January 30, 2014

A big day for BDS: Scarlett Johansson has chosen Sodastream over Oxfam. Oxfam comes out looking very unprincipled, having issued waffling statements and endured media scrutiny of why a human rights organization was dithering over what should have been a no-brainer decision. EI reported disarray within the org. Reuters reported on Palestinian worker complaints of racism at Sodastream's West Bank plant, illegally located in the industrial zone of the Israeli megasettlement, Ma'ale Adumim, and a Palestinian worker told the Electronic Intifada last May the company "treats us like slaves." See also this report on worker treatment at Sodastream's plant by the Israeli NGO Who Profits. The media storm around ScarJo gave wide exposure to BDS; entertainment magazines are covering it. Here is a still from inside a New York taxi an activist took today:

The ScarJo imbroglio may look unrelated to another BDS decision today; the Norwegian Government pension fund divested for a second time from the settlement mogul Lev Leviev's Africa-Israel company. (Leviev had his own embarrassing encounter with Oxfam, over a donation he claimed he gave them, a fact they expeditiously denied) The first time round was part of a wide campaign that probably helped push Leviev to stop construction in the Palestinian village of Bi'lin. This led the Norwegian fund to conclude the company had a clean bill of health - or maybe they did not pay much attention at all - until activists spotted signs for Danya Cebus, Africa-Israel's construction arm, building new units in Gilo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. Activists pressured the Norwegian gov't to re-divest from Africa-Israel. This divestment decision received coverage in Ha'aretz, the Wall Street Journal, & JPost.

So how are these related? Well as this graphic from the Institute for Middle East Undertanding (IMEU) shows, there used to be seven Palestinian villages where Israel has built Ma'ale Adumim. The industrial zone attached to it antiseptically keeps Palestinian workers out of the settlement & away from its Jewish colonists. Scarjo and her supporters argued Sodastream was doing Palestinians a favor by employing them in their factory on land that used to be theirs. In 2004, World War 4 Report wrote about a similar sinister scheme that was being cooked up for the Palestinian farmers who live in villages separated from their farmlands by Israel's security wall & touted by current Kerry aide & Israel lobby vet David Makokvsky. One of these villages, Jayyous, has the Jewish settlement of Zufim built by another of Leviev's companies, Leader Management and Development, built on its lands, and is currently expanding behind the wall. Jayyous is in the same district with the walled-in Palestinian city Qalqilya:.

The Industrial Agenda

What Israel and Makovsky have in mind for the people of Qalqilya district first became clear during a November 2003 visit to Washington by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. On Nov. 14, the Israeli daily Yedioth Aharonot ran an article titled "Mofaz's Initiative: Jobs for Palestinians," reporting that Mofaz presented the US government with an "initiative to build industrial parks that will create jobs for 120 thousand Palestinians." Yediot's Washington correspondent, Orly Azulai, noted that Secretary of State Colin Powell had asked Mofaz to "minimize the suffering caused on Palestinians as a result of the construction of the Separation Fence."

"To implement the initiative, of course, there is a need for an end for terrorism and financial resources," Mofaz said after a meeting with Dick Cheney and Condolezza Rice. "As part of the plan, industrial parks will be built in the Palestinian side and on the seam line. The Palestinians will be able to go to these places without going through IDF checkpoints; private security companies will monitor these passages."

Possibly this will be the fate of Jayyous. The independent farmers of Jayyous who have tilled the land for at least nine generations will be a dependent Israeli-controlled industrial workforce on what used to be their land, without even entering Israel. This is already happening to the south of Jayyous, where residents of Arab Ramadin, who lived off of sheep herding, have been enclosed inside the fence with the illegal Jewish settlement of Alfe Menashe, and, thus cut off from their grazing lands, have been compelled to abandon their traditional way of life and take jobs in the settlement's industrial zone. In a Dec. 18, 2003 press release, the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign of the Palestinian Environmental NGOs Network (PENGON) concluded: "The completion of the Wall and its ghettoization of Arab Ramadin are turning a community of shepherds into exploited workers for Israeli settlement industrial zones, as they are unable to sustain their lives."

January 29, 2014

This is good of the Guardian to pitch in with the campaign to get Oxfam to ditch one of Israel's ambassadors for the occupation, Scarlett Johansson.

Here's the headline:

#NoScarJo: should Oxfam sever ties with Scarlett Johansson?

The article raises many issues around this case and credits our comrades at the Electronic Intifada for coming up with most of the analysis and info.

But it also raises a serious general point about running with people who might raise money and awareness of a cause but, well there's a but:

While there is no doubt that celebrity
endorsement yields financial dividends for NGOs and can raise the
profile of a cause, it can also infuriate staff and create tensions with
communities in which the organisation works. So what should Oxfam do?
Take our poll and tell us your experiences or thoughts on celebrities
and NGOs in the comment threads below.

So check out the poll which still has 6 days to run and check out the comments too. The zionists are having a bit of a field day in the comments but the poll so far is that 87% say #NoScarJo!

January 27, 2014

Being sympathetic to Flying Rodent on Ben Gidley's Bob from Brockley blog I attempted a comment not that long ago. I signed it off with my usual Levi9909 but as far as the tech goes it was anonymous. Well it got deleted within minutes of appearing. I'm just posting it here so I can draw this Flying Rodent's attention to it on Twitter:

Anonymous said...

Flying Rodent - I think you may have been a bit too specific
about the spelling of "as a Jew". Norm railed against these types all
the time as do a whole ragbag of racists around here, HP and Engage, but
Norm only employed the "zz" spelling and the "pet" prefix once. Sadly
Bob here too likes to be precise, especially when it helps him duck and
dodge his way around a critical comment about his condemnation of
Israel's opponents. When he relaxes the precision he can "verbal up"
like the old bill on the case of an Irishman/woman back in the day but
you were precise so he repaid in kind.

You also missed Bob's
presumptiousness about the lack of Jewishness of Israel's Jewish
detractors. Apparently Israel's Jewish supporters do (or have) a lot
more Jewish stuff than Israel's Jewish detractors. And what stuff might
that be? Well you'll just have to ask Bob if you can stand the
inevitable twists and turns. I think he means that supporting Israel is
more Jewish than opposing Israel but it would be uncharacteristically
honest for Bob to admit he meant that.

And don't miss either
Bob's assertion that ""AsaJews"...claim their position is *the*
authentically Jewish one." The definite article is vital here. These
people are usurpers. They are not saying that they are as Jewish as the
next Jew. No, they are saying they are more Jewish than Hirsh, Geras,
Garrard, and Uncle Bob Brockley and all. Except of course, they aren't
and Bob has already claimed that mantle for his brand of authenticity.
They are actually a mixed bag altogether. You were right that some, not
all, use their Jewish identity to bat away the bogus allegation of
anti-Jewish racism. Some want to reclaim the Jewish identity from racist
war criminals and their supporters. Some want to show solidarity with
non-Jews falsely accused of racism for supporting the Palestinian cause
and some want Palestinians to see Jews through a lens other than the
barrel of a supremacist's gun. And there are still others, too numerous
and varied to categorise. But for Bob, there is only one and it's a bad
one.

Anyway, you've already been subjected to the old one two.
One being the false allegation of antisemitism, two being the accusation
of trolling. But then there's three and four, three being Bob's
pretence at accuracy and four you being banned for one and two unless
you stay away for a while which I think you might do without being told.

Levi9909

Actually the fact that the comment has now been deleted suggests that my points three and four, indeed, one, two, three and four were all quite accurate.

UPDATE: He's now reinstated my comment and replied to a tweet I sent but what a dodgy character.

@jewssf I did not delete that comment. It's probably in the moderation queue. But if you harass me I will delete stuff
— Bob From Brockley (@bobfrombrockley) January 27, 2014

But to be honest I'd rather get a reply from Ben Gidley about his alter-ego's plan to write about "the long-harassment of one Ronnie Fraser in UCU, a trade union." The "trade union" is actually his own trade union, you know, the one that some of his comrades left and at least one joined simply to attack it.

January 26, 2014

I've just revisited the blog of "racism expert" Ben Gidley, aka Bob from Brockley where Flying Rodent is on cracking form exposing and denouncing the racism implicit and certainly the bullying inherent in such terminology as "as-a-Jew" etc.

The Rodent copies and pastes the bits he is commenting on so he reads BfB so you don't have to:

...there is the way that the Western anti-Israel left, both its "as a Jew" strain and its gentile majority...

I've tried and failed to see any difference between this whole "As a Jew" thing and either "Uncle Tom" or "House Negro".

All
seem to imply shameful subservience at best, and certainly some kind of
fucked-up ethnoreligious treason. The entire "As a Jew" idea appears
to dictate precisely what Jewish people should and shouldn't think or
behave, implying that people who think otherwise to you are somehow
traitorous or otherwise disgusting. The historical echoes here are
crystal clear.

Quite why this usage has caught on uncritically
among certain foreign policy enthusiasts is mystifying to me, since it
appears to be a rehabilitation of a particularly nasty ethnic slur that
had thankfully fallen from common usage.

(By the way, I've seen
this defended by folk saying things like "Oh, but these awful fucking
AsaJews actually exist and blah blah blah", apparently in the belief
that this renders the insult harmless fun. I'll anticipate this by
pointing out that it doesn't).

First, I am not 100% sure that the terms "Uncle Tom" and "House Negro" are necessarily racist

Neither
am I, but it should be entirely obvious that they're fucking horrible
slurs to be chucking at people, for reasons that are surely too obvious
to require demonstration.

The terms "self-hating Jew" and the
appalling "kapo" carry something of the same meaning as those terms,
and I guess I find them very offensive but not necessarily racist.

These
terms all mean the same thing, and it's not a coincidence that the
people most fond of using them tend also to be horrendous human beings
who have exceptionally nasty opinions on all manner of issues.

Rather, the term is used of those who make a big deal of their Jewishness in prefacing their anti-Zionism.

This
isn't right. It seems to me that some Jewish people who think the
Israelis generally look like a bunch of hard-right belligerent
mentalists determined to thwart a Palestinian state at all costs believe
that, if they preface their acknowledgement of this obvious and
undeniable reality by noting their shared religious background, they
might immunise themselves against utterly fraudulent accusations of
racism.

As demonstrated here however, they're wrong about that,
because of some bizarre coalescing consensus among gung-ho bombs-away
Israel fans that Jews generally should all be Decent war enthusiasts
like you are, and that those who disagree are basically immoral.

I
suggest that this newfound habit of labelling these people as Uncle
Toms for disagreeing with your Likud Are Boiling-With-Hate Mental But
Hey-Ho, Shit Kind Of Happens And That mentality is unjust, unfair and
suspiciously convenient.

There's also an issue of positioning themselves as the Good Jews, the Exceptional Jews, as Arendt put it

I'm
surprised you raise Arendt in this context. She had some very, very
harsh words for the Commie Israel enthusiasts of the fifties and
sixties, so God knows what she'd make of the extreme rightists that run
the place these days.

There's
no need for the "nice euphemism". I'm all over the internet under this
name basically telling everyone how much I dislike your* politics,
which I constantly describe as hopelessly insane sectarian horseshit
mingled with wowserist magical thinking, allied with a very alarming
form of extreme militarism and wearing a very unconvincing cloak of
humanitarianism.

This has squarely nothing to do with anyone's
ethnoreligious background and everything to do with the fact that I
think you're a bunch of lunatics who push highly toxic politics in the
service of an extremely belligerent ideology that has had significant
and hideous real-world effects.

None of which is nice to say to
strangers, but you know, I didn't call you fascist apologists for
psychotic violence or any of the terms that you tend to dole out to your
political enemies, even though most of your political enemies are
entirely imaginary and your own attitude to creative violence is
significantly more enthusiastic than mine.

Now Rodent deserves some bonus points for the Hannah Arendt stuff. Gidley is very fond of describing her as one of his intellectual heroes and I never know why. Certainly she has been accused of intellectual dishonesty and pretentiousness which certainly gives her Venn diagram an overlap with Bob's but she has also exposed zionist collaboration with the nazis and been accused of self-hatred for her trouble. But she did self-describe as a zionist though I'm not sure she ever defined it and she did hold that it was only right and proper to try Eichmann in Jerusalem in spite of his crimes being against humanity not just Jews and certainly not just zionists with whom he collaborated.

But I digress.

At this point Sarah Annes Brown of Harry's Place pops up with a largely irrelevant comment. Is Tom Hickey Jewish? But the Rodent addresses the first part of her comment all the same:

You refer to people who think "the Israelis generally look like a
bunch of hard-right belligerent mentalists determined to thwart a
Palestinian state at all costs" as though this was a reasonable summary
of the situation.

Not only is this "a reasonable summary of the situation", it is
the situation. Many will say "Well, it's more complicated than that"
but at the brass tacks of practicality, taking all of the partisan blah
out of it, it is not more complicated than that.

this seems
to me the mirror image of those who assert that the Palestinians are all
antisemitic brutes who ought to go and live in Jordan.

And
how many divisions have they? None, is the answer - twats of that type
have nothing but internet waffle backing them up, numerous as they are.

For
real, the current situation is that the Israelis are going to
intentionally steal as much shit as they can in a deliberate policy of
fucking over the Palestinians with the quiet yet total support of the
world's only superpower, and folk who don't like it are going to make
some sad faces and whinge, but nothing more.

This is the whole
issue in a nutshell, and all the woe-is-us nonsense that fills the web
to bursting point is just that - woe-is-us nonsense, existing for no
other purpose than to muddy a perfectly straightforward and
easily-comprehensible scenario.

Given that's my opinion on the
matter, you can imagine why I'm not keen on slurs like the one we're
discussing here. People should be able to describe bald facts without
having to fend off insults that wouldn't look out of place in a
Tarantino movie about slaves.

(Although if I'm being honest, I
actually think this one is tame by comparison with Professor Norm's old
habit of referring to "Pet Azzajews", which he used to chuck at Jewish
people who addressed simple undeniable facts of this type. The fact
that nobody smelt a rat there tells me that a lot of people who make a
very big noise about rat-smelling wouldn't smell a rat if a rat was
sitting on thier upper lip slapping on rat-scented aftershave).

UPDATE (14:55) : The thread continues with a false allegation of antisemitism against Flying Rodent by one nutty Contentious Centrist who claims the rat allusion is a metaphor for Jew. And now FR has responded by calling her (for it is she) a conman not woman. Now let's look forward to accusations of sexism instead of the usual antisemitism....

January 13, 2014

My Way has had several versions performed. Of course it was sung by its author, Paul Anka. Frank Sinatra made it famous. Elvis gave it a whirl at Vegas. And I remember Sid Vicious getting a hat tip from the New Musical Express for treating the song with the contempt it deserved for being such self-indulgent tosh. The homophobia of that last example seemed to slip below the NME's radar back then.

Anyway, years ago, back in the day when Ariel Sharon slipped into a coma and the end seemed near, Deborah Maccoby, of Jews for Justice for Palestinians notoriety, wrote this version of My Way:

MY WAY: ARIEL SHARON

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain
My friend, I'll say it clear, I'll state my case, of which I'm certain
I wrecked the hope for peace - I did it all in such a sly way,
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Regrets - I wish I'd killed old Arafat back in the '80s;
I wish that Israel filled right from the Nile to the Euphrates -
But I built settlements and an apartheid settler highway,
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

Yes the were times, I'm sure you knew,
When I bit off more than I could chew.
And yet, from Gaza, I'd no doubt
That I would get the settlers out!
I built a Wall- and best of all, I did it my way!

I knew I would go far in my career as a mass killer.
I started with Qibya, went on to Sabra and Shatila.
But I've made them believe I'm in the middle of the highway!
Likud I left for good - I did it my way!

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has not
To dare to murder and to lie
And not to care how many die;
The record stands, I took their lands
And did it my way!

Hmm, I wonder if the cantor might sing it at the funeral.

Whatever happens, those of us who expected a whitewash got precisely what we expected and Deborah's lyric should be a corrective to that which is why it was appropriate for some bright spark to splice her lyric to a cartoon by Latuff showing the trail of blood in the wake of Sharon's every move being cleansed by the whitewash of the mainstream media. See earlier post.

January 03, 2014

Back when Israel was first deciding to remove its daily presence from the ground in Gaza, whilst controlling everything else, I had an article published in Ireland's Sunday Business Post about the cruel charade. I posted it here too.

Coincidentally, at the time, Yasser Arafat was dying, possibly poisoned on orders, presumably, from Ariel Sharon.

Anyway, here's the piece again:

Sharon’s punishment for the PalestiniansAs
obituaries are being written for the ailing Palestinian leader, Yasser
Arafat, what kind of Palestine does Ariel Sharon promise to the
Palestinians?

The Gaza Strip comprises 360 square kilometres
of land with a population of about 1.4 million Palestinians and 7,500
Jewish settlers. It is mostly desert and much of the arable land is
reserved, at present, for Jewish use only. 75% of its Arab population
live below the poverty line and 13% suffer from malnutrition. It has
no natural freshwater resources and no control over its
telecommunications. It was occupied, together with the West Bank, by
Israel during the six days war of June 1967 and has been occupied ever
since. It is no stranger to Palestinian resistance or Israeli war
crimes. During the ethnic cleansing campaign (1947-1949) that brought
Israel into existence with its Jewish majority, Gaza [with an influx of
Palestinian refugees] became the most densely populated place on earth; a
distinction it still holds. Israel emerged from that war controlling
78% of what was Palestine.

Gaza and Ariel Sharon have been well
acquainted since the 1950s when Ariel Sharon led "reprisal" raids
against Palestinian villages that brought shame even to Israeli leaders.
Foreign Minister Moshe Sharrett referred to one of Sharon’s atrocities
as a "stain [that] would stick to us and not be washed away for many
years". Clearly he underestimated the strength of Zionist propaganda in
the mass media.

During one of Ariel Sharon’s visits to the White
House, President George W. Bush described him as a "man of peace".
Leaving aside the fact that Bush often can’t tell one world leader from
another, it is possible that he was responding to Ariel Sharon’s stated
willingness to make "painful concessions" on the "roadmap" to peace
with the Palestinians. To those familiar with Sharon’s history, the
description "man of peace" wasn’t one that sprang to mind. Apart from
the bloody and disproportionate "reprisals" mentioned above, he was the
architect of the Lebanon war that began in 1982 with the slaughter of
perhaps 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a matter of weeks.
The Israeli Supreme Court declared Sharon "unfit for office" because of
his culpability in some particularly gruesome atrocities by Israel’s
Lebanese allies in the refugee camps of Shatila and Sabra. Whenever
there have been peaceful overtures by Arab states or the Palestine
Liberation Organisation, Sharon’s response has always been, at best,
dismissive and usually downright hostile. He has had more Palestinians
killed, for example, since the PLO accepted Israel’s right to exist on
78% of Palestine than when their demand was for a "democratic secular
state" or the "destruction of Israel" as the Zionists prefer to call it.
In 1981, the Rabat plan, whereby the Arab states agreed to normalise
relations with Israel in return for Israel withdrawing to its pre-1967
boundaries, was described by Sharon as "a declaration of war". And the
recent Saudi peace plan, much the same as Rabat, is now gathering dust.

In
addition to the war crimes Sharon has always had a reputation for being
dishonest with his political masters. His first patron, David Ben
Gurion, recorded in his diary (29/1/1960) that "if he could wean himself
from the habit of lying he could be an exemplary military leader."
Later, in 1982 he lied to Menachem Begin about his aims in the Lebanon
war. He lied to the Kahane Commission (Supreme Court), he lost a libel
action against the Israeli liberal daily Ha’aretz and now he tells of
painful concessions for peace.

So what does the proposed Gaza
withdrawal consist of? We have seen what Gaza itself consists of. It
has almost nothing and what it does have has been commandeered by
illegal colonial settlers or is provided by the UN Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA). The settlers will, if the plan goes ahead, be
withdrawn. Settlers have been known to kill civilians so this could
bring some comfort to the Gazan population. However, if the withdrawal
goes ahead, might Israel press for UNRWA to be withdrawn? UNRWA
provides housing, healthcare, education, but above all, jobs. This
isn’t mere speculation. Some weeks ago, Sharon accused an UNRWA
ambulance team of loading a Qassam (home made) missile on to an
ambulance. He was too hasty in his accusation. Israeli intelligence
didn’t have time to doctor their photographic "evidence" and the
accusation was exposed as another lie when the "missile" turned out to
be a stretcher. But looking at American websites and other media, many
commentators have happily run with the Qassam story. This does not
simply expose Palestinian ambulances to Israeli attacks. Israel has
attacked medical facilities without "pretext" before. It is to
undermine the authority and credibility of the Agency in order to hinder
all of its work. Taken with the mass campaign of political
assassinations, Sharon is creating a Gaza with no viable economy or
polity.

Sharon has said that his withdrawal plan is a part of
Bush’s much vaunted "road map" to peace and Palestinian statehood. This
is curious since his most trusted adviser, Dov Weisglass, is on record
as saying that "the significance of the disengagement plan is the
freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you
prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a
discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively,
this whole package called the Palestinian state with all that it
entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda". So the idea of
following the road map is yet another lie by Sharon, though Weisglass
has since been forced to withdraw his prepared statement.

But how
painful is this particular concession? In a way, it represents a step
back by Sharon. True, the Jewish population of Gaza is hardly a
significant factor as a proportion of Israel’s population as a whole and
Sharon has always said that "Zionism is not about what Israel can do
for Jews but what Jews can do for Israel." But his party, the Likud,
still sings the anthem Shtei Gadot with its expansionist lyric "one side
of the Jordan is ours and so is the other". So relinquishing land, any
land, is always painful. The outcry from the far-right isn’t just
choreography, though that is part of it. But the Israel-free Gaza will
be so enfeebled and dependent many Palestinians will have to leave as
they have done for decades now. The ethnic cleansing that Israel has
failed to fully achieve by war, they have tried to make up for by
economic stealth and this will surely continue in an "independent" Gaza.
If large sections of the population leave, it is likely that only the
most militant would remain. If this happens it wouldn’t take much for
Sharon or a successor to manufacture a pretext for reoccupation.

Some
commentators are perplexed over the support that Sharon is now
garnering from the Zionist "left" for his plan. This is because they
fail to see that Zionism doesn’t really have a left. Traditionally, the
Likud wanted Jewish rule over Palestine and the Palestinians if needs
be. Ethnic cleansing was never an essential part of their policy. They
were happy to go the "way of (apartheid) South Africa". This never
suited the left. The call for "transfer" (the expulsion of all of the
Arabs from all of Palestine) was always a Labourite demand. The strict
segregation engendered by the barrier is also a Labourite idea. The
fact is that Sharon has a Labour Zionist background and he has made no
significant departures from that throughout his career.

So
with massive military strength, a reduction in Palestinian attacks, a
Palestinian leadership either dead or brought to its knees, the
uncritical support of an American President (and Congress and
Presidential hopeful) and no viable alternative government of Israel,
why is Sharon withdrawing from Gaza? When the disengagement plan was
first discussed, Sharon’s extreme right critics argued that he was
rewarding the Palestinians. His words in an interview with Yedioth
Ahronoth (Israel’s most popular daily newspaper) are informative. Of
unilateral disengagement from Gaza he said that "this should be seen as a
punishment and not a reward for the Palestinians".

For once, he might just be telling the truth.

Just see how many in the mainstream media mention that when Sharon finally dies.

I'm pleased with the picture which I took from Swallow Street, just across Piccadilly from St James's Church. The point is the visibility of the thing. Everyone who walks along Piccadilly towards Piccadilly Circus sees it and everyone I saw passing, stopped to take a closer look and that was when the place was closed.

I reckon more people have seen that wall in London that have seen the real thing on TV in the whole of the UK.

If you want an even closer look than I got then consider what are left of the events lined up by the Bethlehem Unwrapped partnership. Apparently zionists have been picketing and leafleting at each event but they are summoning the faithful for a particularly menacing presence on 4th Jan. It wouldn't surprise me if the Israeli embassy's decision to pull out of the panel discussion might be linked to their sheer embarrassment at the antics to be expected of the zionists. On the other hand it could just be that there simply is no case for The State of Israel. Yeah, that's probably it.